Cultivating an attention to frustrations is a fantastic competency to develop. Because frustrations are often the soil in which new innovations flourish, minding your frustrations can yield entrepreneurial gold!

Most folks are the victims OF a breakthrough more often than they are the perpetrators. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can tempt lightning… Or at least, we can increase the odds of a strike.

Organizations inadvertently insulate us from the things that bother our customers. When we immerse ourselves in our own products and processes, we viscerally experience what needs to be reinvented.

The company’s next product might be hiding in plain sight: where you’re already servicing your own needs. Thinking about yourself as the first customer among many, instead of the total addressable market, is a game-changer.

I had the privilege of thinking alongside the brilliant Kim Scott, and shared some insights on her “Radical Candor” blog. Re-posting here with her permission. Feedback welcome!

What kind of contributions get rewarded in your workplace? What constitutes brilliance? It’s critical to recognize that the definition of “genius” changes as we shift between convergent and divergent modes of thinking — and what gets rewarded should, too.

John Cleese highlights a classic study of architects in his recent memoir, “Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide,” which illuminates the value of purposeful procrastination, and how it sets creatives apart.

Breakthroughs are often ushered in by surprises. And surprises take many forms. Sometimes you go seek them out, but other times, the surprises seem to do the seeking, at least to the person who’s aware of their tactics. One of my favorite tactics of a surprise is to sneak up like a joke.

All too often we are trapped by implicit assumptions and definitions that arrest our thinking. But how do we overcome these blind spots? One way is to deliberately seek out interpretations that challenge our own definitions of words like “customer delight.”

Innovators from Aristotle to Einstein to Beethoven to Edison have wielded the power of a nap. And while I’ve long appreciated these examples, I’ve never had a “nap-to-eureka!” story of my own… until recently.

While reframing is necessary to generate breakthrough solutions, oftentimes a new frame in and of itself is insufficient to unleash a team’s breakthrough thinking: many still find themselves at a loss for how to proceed. This tool creates breadcrumbs for moving forward.